Leverage: The 1st Season DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

I'm not a huge TV person... well, I wasn't when I first heard about Leverage. I guess I'm still not a huge TV person, but I'm slowly changing my ways, and this amazing bundle of entertainment we call Leverage is one of the best shows I've come across since the departure of my all-time favorite TV show ever, The Shield. Yes, I still have a lot of catching up to do, with shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and Californication and plenty of others, but Leverage is just simply one of the coolest and most entertaining shows I've come across in ages.

There are several different shows and even movies you can compare Leverage to. I like to say it's a harmonious convergence of The A-Team, Ocean's 11 and Robin Hood, but despite these influences, the show definitely has its own style and edge. Right away in the pilot we're introduced to Nathan Ford (Timothy Hutton), who is immediately approached by a man (guest star Saul Rubinek) who needs his help in recovering some stolen airplane designs. He's assembled a team of thieves, but he needs Nathan - an honest man/former insurance investigator, who at one time had tracked down all the thieves - to keep track of them. The job is successful and it's a "walk-away" so they're never supposed to see each other again, but the next day, when they don't get paid, they meet up and discover they've been duped themselves. So they band back together again to run a game on the man who set them up and, in doing so, form an odd but incredibly effective team who decide to run cons on corporate bad guys and anyone who tries to put the screws to the common man. The last line of the pilot episode, which Nathan says to a grieving family, sums up this new team's mission quite well: "Right now you're suffering under an enormous weight. We provide... Leverage."

The show is just some of the most good old-fashioned fun you'll have on the small screen. Almost every facet of the show is flawless, from the unique and very colorful characters, to the fabulous writing from week to week. One thing that kind of perplexed me about this four-disc DVD set, however, is, aside from the first two and last two or three episodes of the season, the episodes are shown on the disc out of order from their TNT airdate. Personally, before watching this whole season, I had only seen the first two episodes, which I really loved, but I really don't understand why they would jumble up the middle of the season like this. On the other hand, this jumbled order plays out just fine and that's part of the beauty of this show, in that, while there are through-lines that play out throughout the season, you can really jump into this show at any point and enjoy from then on out. Creators Chris Downey and John Rogers have crafted a show that is just as big on entertainment as it is on smarts. Each episode gives us a new con that the team is taking on, and Downey, Rogers and their writing team manages to come up with some wonderful twist endings for each and every episode that you hardly ever see coming. Not only that but, while Timothy Hutton's Nathan Ford is the lead and the main player here, they do a terrific job of giving each of the team members their own "episode," so to speak, where we get to learn a little bit more about where they came from. It also helps that the characters and the wonderful actors who portray them, perform smashingly throughout the season.

The characters titles might not be incredibly original, but the characters themselves really are. Christian Kane plays Eliot Spencer (a.k.a. the "muscle"), who is described as a "retrieval specialist" and with his immense background in hand-to-hand combat, there isn't a situation he can't get out of. Aldis Hodge plays Alec Hardison (a.k.a. the "hacker") a computer genius who can find any backdoor into any computer system and has the normal propensity for video games. Beth Riesgraf plays Parker (that's all we know, at this point) (a.k.a. the "thief") who has been stealing paintings and jumping off of buildings for most of her adult life, as far as we know, and Gina Bellman plays the last addition to the team, Sophie Devereaux (a.k.a. the "actress"), a woman who strives to be a top-notch actress... but her performances are terrible in conventional roles and she can only shine as an actress when she's breaking the law.

It's really hard to pick a favorite character here, to be honest, because they all bring so much to the show and it's great that the show allows them to all slip into different fake characters in each episode. Kane, Hodge, Riesgraf and Bellman all deliver wonderfully in their performances throughout the season, but it truly was a joy to watch Timothy Hutton at center stage once again. While Hutton has had no trouble getting work whatsoever in recent years, it's great to see him get top billing again and he truly deserves it for his outstanding performance as Nathan Ford. While Ford is committed to running this team of converted thieves, Ford definitely has a lot of baggage. His son died when the insurance company he worked for, refused to pay for a procedure that would've saved his life and he went into a downward spiral ever since, losing his job and his wife as well. He definitely has a drinking problem as well and his character arc throughout the season is just riveting to watch, as his relationship with his team starts to falter along the way. While I definitely have a new cast of supporting favorites in Christian Kane, Aldis Hodge, Beth Riesgraf and Gina Bellman, Timothy Hutton - almost 30 years after winning an Oscar - is still at the top of his game as Nathan Ford, and it's something you really have to see. There is also a flurry of wonderful guest stars throughout the season like Saul Rubinek, Mark Sheppard recurring as Jim Sterling, who works for Nathan's old insurance company, D.B. Sweeney as a priest and old friend of Nathan in The Miracle Job, Dan Lauria as a mob boss and Nicole Sullivan as his bitchy wife-to-be in The Wedding Job, NHL star Jeremy Roenick as a security guard in The Mile High Job, Lauren Holly as a woman conspiring to control a jury in The Juror #6 Job, with Brent Spiner guest-starring in that episode as well, and Kevin Tighe as Nathan's old insurance company boss in the two-part season finale, The First David Job and The Second David Job. Kari Matchett also appears in both episodes as Nathan's ex-wife, Maggie.

Leverage is just simply one of my absolute favorite new TV shows. It's incredibly entertaining without dumbing down the material (it's actually a lot smarter than most shows), with some tremendous characters and uber-slick writing every week. I'd be hard pressed to find a show that's just this much damn fun on all of television.

We get a decent amount of special features on this four-disc set and we start things off with Leverage: Behind the Scenes. We get a brief introduction from Dean Devlin, who executive produced and directed many of the episodes, and he tells us about the series for a bit and we hear from Hutton and creators John Rogers and Chris Downey and it was rather interesting to hear from Apollo Robbins. He is the technical adviser on the show and he is actually a real con artist. We get some breakdowns on all the characters and we hear from the main cast of Hutton, Christian Kane, Aldis Hodge, Beth Riesgraf and Gina Bellman and it's a nice little 12-minute look at the show as a whole, with some interesting tidbits along the way.

Anatomy of a Stunt Fight is next and we see Christian Kane going through a fight sequence with one of his old friend, Clayne Crawford, who plays one of the only guys to give Kane's Eliot Spencer character a solid challenge in The First David Job. This essentially just breaks down a stunt fight for us, as we see both Kane and Crawford going through the beats and motions of a fight and it's a neat little three minute bit that shows how these guys prepare for a fight scene.

The Cameras of Leverage are next and they take us through what they use on the show, like the Red Digital Cinema Red One and the Sony XDCam. This is kind of weird, because it's just a weird two-minute montage of these two cameras, set to the Leverage theme music. I really don't know why this is relevant, but whatever.

Leverage Gets Renewed is next and they set this up almost as a little covert op itself. They set us up by telling us it's Monday morning at 8 AM and the producers, writers and cast of the show have gathered for a press event, and some of them are joining in via remote satellite or whatever, with Christian Kane in Nashville, Timothy Hutton in Paris and Gina Bellman in London with Aldis Hodge and Beth Riesgraf in L.A. We quickly find out that they're not gathered for a press event, but they brought everyone together in person or online to share the news that they were picked up for a second season. We don't really see stuff like this too often on DVD's and it's a pretty cool thing to see. We get some really cool reactions from the cast and we even have Dean Devlin and Aldis Hodge playing a little prank on Hodge's mom by feigning that they were canceled and then saying they were picked up. Good stuff, folks, good stuff. It's only three minutes long but it's a very cool thing and a very rare thing to have everyone together to tell them they've been renewed.

Beth Riesgraf's Crazy Actress Spoof is next and it's a little skit with Riesgraf playing a snotty actress version of herself, being a prima donna and demanding certain things from the writing staff. It's actually pretty damn hilarious because she does a damn good job as an insane actress and she co-wrote the skit herself as well. It's about four and a half minutes long and quite a good time.

There are also some Deleted Scenes spread throughout nine of the 13 episodes as well for your perusal.

These awesome episodes are presented in the widescreen format, although the aspect ratio wasn't listed on the packaging.

The sound is handled through the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound format.

Some rather slick work here, just like the show. The front cover features a nice shot of Hutton and his merry band of thieves behind him with some cash flying around in the air and the title card at the bottom. The back features something I can't recall seeing before: they split the back cover diagonally, with some great images on the left triangle of the cover and a solid synopsis and special features box on the right triangle, with a shot of Beth Riesgraf's Parker hanging from a rappelling line for good measure. In case you're one of those who likes the little episode breakdowns, the keep-case they use here is clear-plastic and on the inside you'll find episode breakdowns for all 13 episodes here. Great work here.

Leverage is just one of the coolest shows I've seen in quite some time. There's plenty of humor, drama and action here all blended together superbly for a final product that's just as addictive as it is entertaining.